Sunday, September 26, 2010

AltTulsa likes to stay abreast of the city's cultural world, so it is always great when we can say a few kind words about the Tulsa Opera.

The opera's new season begins in a few days (October 9, to be precise) with Verdi's La Traviata, the company's original opera way back in 1948. Three performances are scheduled, Saturday, October 9; Friday, October 15; and Sunday, October 17.

Although we claim no background in opera, we do know enough about high culture to recognize this as one of great ones.

We are planning on going—we hope many others Tulsa-area opera fans go too. It should be a winner. Check out the Tulsa Opera's website on this production here.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

The Republican "Pledge to America," released today, has taken a beating from conservative blogger Erick Erickson, the man behind RedState.co.

The New York Daily News is reporting that Erickson called the pledge the "most ridiculous thing to come out of Washington since George McClellan," a reference to the ineffective Union general during the Civil War.

But, wait, there's more. From the Daily News:

Erickson blasted the document for not providing specific, long-term solutions.

"Yes, yes, it is full of mom-tested, kid-approved pablum that will make certain hearts on the right sing in solidarity," he wrote on his blog, Redstate.com. "But like a diet full of sugar, it will actually do nothing but keep making Washington fatter before we crash from the sugar high."

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

The Tea Party's Christine O'Donnell, who cancelled her Sunday appearance on a real CBS interview show, appeared last night on Sean Hannity's gabfest on Fox News—a way to avoid facing awkward questions about her views.

Friday, September 17, 2010

She's flying around the country—she was in Tulsa this week—reciting platitudes and anointing Tea Party winners (in Delaware on Tuesday) while her own numbers continue to fall.

The latest NY Times/CBS News poll shows that Palin's own popularity is down 9 percentage points since April.

Even her endorsements don't cut much weight among the general electorate, according to the poll. "Only one in 10 [of those polled] said her support would make them more likely to support a candidate," the Times reported.

But there's some good news for Palin in the numbers as well. Turns out, that Fox News viewers like Palin a lot. Big surprise here—not!

Hmmm. Appears as if those people who want news they can agree with—as opposed to, say, actual facts and hard realities—really, really like a former politician who can wink and spout niceties at the same time.

Newt was once an important political figure. He was the main mover in the Republican revolution of the 1990s and Speaker of the House of Representatives.

In 2010, Newt has shown himself to be a fringe politician. As Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote this week, Newt went batty in his recent criticism of President Obama, explaining the president's actions as "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior."

This sort of baloney is typical anti-Obama rhetoric on the Right, but it's also hyperbolic nonsense, as Robinson makes clear. It assumes, Robinson notes, that "Obama somehow absorbed a fully elaborated, frozen-in-time anti-colonial worldview from his Kenyan father. Who left the family when the future president was 2."

Robinson notes that this sort of reasoning is not new to Gingrich, who jumped on Sonia Sotomayor as a racist and compared supporters of the Lower Manhattan mosque as Nazis.

Robinson concludes by pointing out—correctly—Newt's real problem:

Gingrich seems to believe that our culture and values are also threatened from within—by black and brown people who demand that they, too, be given a voice in defining that culture and those values. But, hey, it's a free country. If he wants, Gingrich can imagine himself a retired British colonel in 1963, harrumphing in his armchair about who lost Kenya. A diverse and multicultural America has long since moved on.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Kudos to the good folks at Media Matters, who have sorted through the blather and misinformation about President Obama in Forbes.

For those of you keeping score at home, this article was the source of Newt Gingrich's recent claim that Obama is a Kenyan colonialist, a charge so flimsy that Gingrich and Forbes have been roundly criticized.

Media Matters has identified numerous errors in the Forbes piece, written by Dinesh D'Souza, a conservative activist (read: hack) with more imagination than honesty.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Newt Gingrich has taken a well-deserved public beating in the last few days for going off the deep end on the Right's "Obama isn't one of us" campaign.

It's all hogwash, but Talk Radio and the Fox pundits keep pushing this line in spite of its transparent silliness.

To hear the wingnuts talk, Obama was born somewhere else (Kenya? Indonesia?), so he's not a citizen and—even worse—he's a socialist/communist/fascist and an anti-American zealot who hates all white people.

This makes a good tall tale, especially if you happen to be a paranoid racist with little grasp of reality.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

The right-wing, anti-everything crowd has been whining for months (years, really) that the U.S. government bailed out the big boys on Wall Street while ignoring us small fry on Main Street.

Well, yes.

But—and this is a BIG but—the federal bailout, known as TARP—actually worked. It did. A second Great Depression was avoided and a full-scale economic collapse did not occur.

It's unpopular to admit this, but in some circles the success of TARP has begun to be recognized.Politico has examined this and published its report, a report that contradicts the popular story. (The complete story is here.)

Meanwhile, the Tea Party folks and reactionary Republicans continue to fume, pretending that their solution—doing nothing!—would have worked. Not very likely.

As we like to say, the Radical Right—some of the finest minds of the 1920s.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Calvin Coolidge is an unlikely political hero. Coolidge, after all, is routinely considered one of the worst U.S. presidents. Coolidge was so inert as the commander-in-chief that he became known as "Silent Cal."

Now Coolidge is the hero of the Tea Party, which likes the 30th president for his anti-tax positions and his inactivity in the White House.

A Tea Party blogger has referred to Coolidge as "the patron saint of the Tea Party."

AltTulsa wishes to congratulate the Tea Party on their choice of heroes. It makes perfect sense that the Tea Party wingbags would select a do-nothing president as their symbolic leader.

We're certain that doing nothing is exactly the right course of action for the federal government in every situation. Example: The nation is attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, so (according to the Coolidge doctrine) the Feds should do nothing. Hurricane Katrina hits the Gulf Coast and the levees fail in New Orleans, the federal response should be nothing.

Hey, doing nothing is the perfect solution for every occasion. Which brings us back to Calvin Coolidge, who did nothing to prevent the Great Depression.Thanks, Calvin!

And thanks to the enlightened visionaries in today's Tea Party, some of the finest minds of the 1920s.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

AltTulsa has long been critical of the Tea Party crowd, people who seemed long on whining (and faux victimization) and short on solutions.

No it was no surprise to us to hear that the Tea Party is running out of steam. When all you can do is complain and blame others, there's little hope for an actual political organization with a coherent approach to the nation's problems.

Here's the result from a recent poll:

Support for the Tea Party appears to have flat lined, as only 12 percent of voters consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement, compared to 14 percent in earlier surveys. Voter favorability of the Tea Party is split 30 - 31 percent, also down slightly to the lowest score.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Those fun-loving, totally patriotic Tea Parties folks are all the rage these days.

Grab a tricornered hat and an historical flag, and—presto!—you too can assume the role of revolutionary patriot fighting for freedom and basic American values, just like the real Founding Fathers (and Mothers).

Or maybe not.

As USA Today columnist Dewayne Wickham wrote this week in the Tulsa World, the Tea Party has it exactly back-asswards. They say they want Constitutional values, but they actually "espouse views that threaten to turn this nation and its founding documents upside down."

Rand Paul, Kentucky's Tea Party Senate candidate, has said that Congress went too far when it outlawed racial discrimination in private businesses, a position that would effectively reinstitute racial segregation in the South. Oops!

Paul has now backtracked on that position, Wickham notes.

Or how about Sharron Angle, who has talked about "Second Amendment remedies" to the nation's problems? Hmmm. Advocating violence against the government doesn't seem all that Constitutional, does it?

Wickham writes, "It's the kind of warped sense of entitlement that plunged this nation into a bloody civil war."

In short, Wickham continues, the Tea Parties blowhards are akin to the Know Nothing Party of the 1850s, a party that "ultimately collapsed from the weight of its own intolerance and blurred political vision."

Anger and resentment are not the building blocks for a coherent political philosophy. Let's hope the Tea Party folks—some of whom share the intolerance and blindness of the past—meet the same fate at the Know Nothings.

Friday, September 3, 2010

When it comes to politics, Americans don't have especially long memories.

If they did, they might raise questions about the lineup of pundits over at Fox News, a cast of misinformers and lying liars who have been consistently wrong about, well, a great many things.

Our friends over at Media Matters have compiled a record of right-wing errors and lies. It's fascinating stuff, certainly worth remembering. It's high time that the right—so cocksure of its policies and ideas—was held accountable.